Michael Castello gives details behind blockbuster $3.1 million domain name sale.
Michael Castello (with his brother David known as “The Castello Brothers”) has sold the domain name Whisky.com for $3.1 million, DNJournal reported today.
This is a phenomenal sale. Michael Castello did a great job explaining how the sale came to be. Here are some of the highlights from my perspective:
* The buyer owns Whisky.de. ccTLD owners still want the .com version of their domain names.
* The sale bests Roy Messer’s 2006 sale of Vodka.com. That was back in the good ole’ days, but even then it seemed like an outlier. A lot of people (myself included) thought people were crazy for asking similar prices for their liquor domain names.
* Given the two common spellings of whisky and whiskey, this sale is even more impressive.
* You know that blog TorontoDomainer.com? The owner made $310,000 off of this sale by helping to broker the domain. Not only that, but Toofun from TorontoDomainer.com got to know Michael Castello because Michael reached out to him when he was in Toronto. This shows the power of relationships. Even when you’re not sure what someone can do for you, it’s worth establishing relationships.
What an incredible feel-good story.
Fantastic sale!
and what a great “hand reg” story…
Congrats!
…more inconvenient news for the New gTLD crowd.
(Crowd as: a dozen Newbie investors and another dozen “I missed the dot com boat” angry pushers )
Dot Com or Dot Die!
Definitely what makes this a great sale is the fact that there are two different common spellings. I always spell it whiskey.com. Congrats to the Castellos.
Definitely a feel good story. Congratulations to all from The Castello bros, to buyer, to Toronto Domainer! Wow…
“…more inconvenient news for the New gTLD crowd.”
Depends if the buyer knew that hundreds of new extensions were on the way – I suspect he didn’t.
Congrats to the Castellos and Toofun. I am selling bxb.com Happy to work with interested parties to broker a sale with me.
So that’s what the buzz was about that I was hearing muffled.
Congratulations to those directly involved (including the buyer) and the domain industry as a whole!
There was NO loser in this deal! I’ve been thinking about it all along!!
Thank you everyone. Appreciate the positive feedback. The Whisky.com sale should give some clarity to our industry.
@Michael “The Whisky.com sale should give some clarity to our industry.” Definitely! Very inspiring story!
I visited Whisky.com and found the name of the company is now “Whisky.com Media GmbH & Co. KG” Did the company change its name?
Congratulations Michael and David!!! Both of you have put Boynton Beach on the map:)…(Steve Hall)
@Kassey
I believe they set that up for the new company to take possession of whisky.com.
Thanks Michael. I find this story very intriguing, so I did a little bit of search on the Internet, and found the following sources:
The company “The Whisky Store” was started by Theresia Lüning in 1993. Herself is a good story to read. Great entrepreneur! They started their Internet business using Whisky24.de, then upgraded to Whisky.de, and finally to Whisky.com that we know now.
Oliver Klimek did an interview with them back in 2010. Details here:
http://www.dramming.com/2014/01/06/german-retailer-the-whisky-store-buys-whisky-com-domain/
and
http://www.dramming.com/2010/11/10/whisky-people-11-theresia-and-horst-luning/
Considering their small sales (10 million Euros or US$13m in 2010) and their market being mostly Germany, I don’t understand why they paid $3.1m to get .com while .de is more than sufficient for their market. Can possible explanation? They are very savvy when it comes to leveraging the Internet in their business, though.
I agree, stupid buy for such a small business…completely reckless…but hey, if their check cashed, then good for the seller